Still waiting to be granted residency, González remembers the middle of her senior year of high school, in December 2010, when the immigration reform bill known as the Dream Act was being debated in Congress. The legislation proposed to create a pathway to residency for young adults brought to the country as children.
When the bill died in the Senate, González's hopes were crushed.
"I remember watching it on C-Span and just bawling that it hadn't passed. And it was then I realized how powerful indeed laws are. Simply how the government can touch very, very deeply into the lives of people," she said.
"It started to dawn on me that I wasn't going to be able to go to college, not in the U.S. anyhow."
González explained that under U.S. immigration law, undocumented minors are not held responsible for their stay in the country. However, this relief from legal consequences ends six months after a young person's 18th birthday. For González, this day fell in April of her senior year of high school.
"It was a very rough, really awkward conversation with my high school principal to be able to arrange an early graduation," she said.
As the time neared for her to leave the U.S., González grew more and more upset. "I didn't want to leave St. Louis; I didn't want to leave my parents; I didn't want to leave the goal I had set in mind for so long of attending college."
"I was very angry at the situation. I had worked so hard in high school and before that to graduate top of my class, to take all these AP courses, and none of it was going to count anyhow."
González had to travel by herself to Mexico where she stayed with her older brother, who had returned a few years earlier. Upon her arrival, she was struck by the contrast in economic statuses.
"The first picture I got of the country was seeing this gorgeous hotel that had slums at the bottom of it; it was overlooking poverty. I still can't totally erase that picture from my mind."
González was enrolled to study biology at the University of Guadalajara. But when she arrived in Mexico, there were still four months before classes started.
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"I had returned from home itself, to live in this very strange place that held nothing familiar, that I had really no ties in," she said. "I think it's the hardest thing I've yet to do in my life."
González wasn't able to return to the U.S. at all, even to visit her family. "I had to pray for the strength to just be patient and to trust that I'd see my parents not very far from that point. It was scary. I thought, gosh, it's never going to happen."
"I was blessed to see what I saw in Mexico, too," she added, though, "to meet the people that I met there."
"I think I had a very, very negative image of it. Possibly more negative than Americans. You would think that I would have had more of a love for it. But it simply, for so many years in my young life, had been the place where my parents could not provide for us."
"By the end of my time there, as much as I loved it, as much as it had, thank God, become a home for me, it's not as if I'd stay there if I could move."
It was in May 2012 that González's father obtained residency. Through him, his children were sponsored to gain residency as well.